1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a test apparatus, a serial transmission system, a program, and a recording medium.
2. Related Art
A semiconductor test apparatus is provided with a plurality of test modules. Each test module sends and receives testing data to and from another test module or to and from a performance board on which is mounted a device under test. The test modules perform data transmission using a high speed serial bus, with the objective of transmitting large amounts of data in a short amount of time.
A high degree of reliability is desired in the communication between test modules in the semiconductor test apparatus, such as a bit error rate in a range from approximately 10−17 to 10−19. Despite this, recent increases in transmission speed have been accompanied by an increase in the bit error rate. A known technique for improving reliability of the transmission path involves framing the transmission data and using a resend control to resend a frame in which a bit error occurs.
The transmission side is controlled by a CPU or the like to resend transmission data that was not received successfully, thereby ensuring successful transmission of all of the data. If an acknowledgement signal is lost in the transmission path, however, it takes a long time to detect that a resending is necessary. As a result, there is a problem that a large buffer size and circuit size is needed to store the data over a long period.